Pregnancy Centers Found to Misinform Pregnant Women

A pro-choice group is out with some surprising charges about a chain of centers offering help to women dealing with unwanted pregnancies.

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NARAL-Pro Choice Virginia spent a year doing an undercover investigation of 56 Crisis Pregnancy Centers and found many of them giving bogus medical information:

“Eighteen of the centers said that breast cancer was linked to abortion, which has been disproven by several prominent medical organizations. Twenty-five centers connected abortion to infertility and pre-term births in later pregnancies which – again – is just absolutely false and has been debunked as well.”

Spokesperson Alena Yarmosky says other women were told they were at increased risk for eating disorders, alcoholism and drug addiction if they terminated their pregnancies.

NARAL also accuses the chain of false advertising.

“The most common example of a Crisis Pregnancy Center ad just says something like, ‘Pregnant? Need Help? Call this number.’ So that ad doesn’t give any indication that it’s an anti-choice facility, or that it doesn’t support abortion. The other thing that we found is that a lot of these centers are listed under abortion in things like Yelp, so if you type in Abortion and Manassas, the first thing that comes up is a Crisis Pregnancy Center, which does not provide abortions.”

The group is calling on Virginia’s Department of Public Health to regulate such centers – requiring them to provide only medically accurate information and tell women, upfront, that they do not support abortion. NARAL also wants the state to stop referring women to the centers for legally required pre-abortion ultrasounds.